Magonia (29 page)

And sags at one end, one sail half gone.

I see Jik slash at a Breath, stronger than I could have imagined, still on Zal’s ship, but fighting for me. I’m screaming hard, this song roaring out of my throat. Because. I can’t. I won’t let this be true.

I sing the hummingbirds loose from the official ship’s sail. They fly, darts of dark, fast, fast, into the sky.

My song rises up, Dai amplifying it, and one wasp detaches itself from the
Regalecus
’s other sail. Then another. A swarm spins up into the dark. And then, there’s a grinding in the sky. The ship lurches, ponderously, a huge weight settling.

Heyward raises her chin in the air, inhales from her oxygen and starts to launch herself to tackle me to the deck.

NO.

I dive at her instead with everything I have. Every memory. Every rage. Everything.

Jason.

I open my mouth and Milekt and Dai join with me. Sand forms in the space between Heyward and me. I sing the air solid. I sing it full.

Choke
, I sing, and I think of her lungs, think of her gasping the way I gasped all my life, strangling on air.

I knock her down, but she’s not that easy. She kicks herself forward, a knife in each hand, trying to get to my chest to cut me open, cut Milekt out. She’s trying to kill my canwr.

I sing harder, deeper. I feel things shattering on this ship, Breath helmets, and bits of rigging.

Heyward’s knife slices my arm.

All I have is my voice, but it pushes her, twists her, wrings her.

All around us, my crew and Zal are fighting Breath.

Heyward’s hurt. She grits her teeth, pure force of will, and launches herself at me again.

I roar, this shrill shrieking noise, and I feel it vibrate my vocal cords, feel my canwr with me, and there’s Heyward in front of me, and a sound, a thundering sound.

JASON
, I screamsing.

I can hear what I’m doing, calling to the sky and telling it to come to me. Telling it to empty itself for me.

The air’s cracking. There are flashes of light all around us, the sky splitting, and I’m still making the noise, high and sweet and deadly.

I feel it in my fingers, in my tongue, in my teeth, the beginning of fire.

I’m making a storm now, making the air into it, making parts of our bodies into it.

And we sing.

IF YOU KILL THE PEOPLE I LOVE, I WILL DESTROY YOU.

It’s a deathsong, and I’m not sure whose. If it’s for Jason or Heyward or for the entire universe.

Inside my chest Milekt revolts, refusing that song, and I gasp, choking, trying to breathe.

In that pause, all the Breath dive off the ship, covering themselves in shadows.

Heyward is the last to go, abandoning ship. She shouts in fury, shoots me a look made of ice, and dives off the plank.

They’re gone into the night faster than we can follow.

My song is broken by tears. I can’t. I can’t.

Jason.

I sag. I sing, and I don’t know what I’m singing now, but it’s only grief and after a minute, all I can do is sob.

My crew ransacks
Regalecus,
hanging in the sky now by a single sail. They open the closets, pushing through the vaults, taking provisions.

I’m with Dai, walking as though I’m asleep. I keep thinking
squid
. I keep thinking
burned
. I keep thinking
gone
.

Dead. Dead?

I feel a kind of blankness. I won’t cry again in front of Dai. I won’t cry at all.

If I do, I’ll never stop.

Dai pulls the curtain off one of the portholes, and it’s startling to see the room cloud lit, gray and piercing.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.

“For what?”

“Your friend,” he says.

He looks at me, his expression tight, his mouth a crooked line. “I know you loved him.”

“I—”

“I know what it’s like,” he cuts in. “I know how it feels to lose someone you love.”

I shut my eyes for a moment and stay in the dark. I stay there a while.

“What were you doing?” he finally asks me.

“When?”

“When you took off with Zal’s heartbird,” he says.

“Nothing,” I say dumbly. “I made a mistake.”

“You set the falcon free,” he says.

“Yeah.”

Dai nods. “Even if he betrayed Zal long ago, he had no memory of it. It’s better to set him free. He had no song, no use. He should have been released.”

Dai opens a cabinet in the corner. I catch a glimpse of something pale, something fleshy. A body?

Oh god, what if it’s—

“They’re just skins,” Dai says. “Same as the one you were in. Though impressive ones. New versions. Maganwetar must plan to go down amongst them now. That’s useful knowledge.”

He rifles through them. They’re each encased in their own bag. I shiver. Dai takes my hand. That does me no good. He pulls one of the skins out from inside the closet.

It’s less than a body. Flat, deflated, almost a piece of clothing. She’s pale and sad, her face peaceful. A lifelike doll-woman, hanging inside a clear sack, zipped into it. Her hair is long and blond. Her skin is pale, and her eyes are shut. Her lips are just slightly open.

“How do they even work?” I ask Dai, trying to distract myself from everything.

He tilts the skin inside its covering, showing me. There’s an opening at its spine.

“You touch them and they wrap around you. They cover your skin, your organs. The one you had on down below would have made you indistinguishable from a drowner, though it should have degraded after a month or so. I don’t know why it lasted so long.”

I groan at the thought of the past. All I want to do is wrap myself back up in my old skin, my familiar human self, the body I knew everything about, however flawed and Magonian it secretly was. But it’s gone. I’m this thing that emerged from it, some kind of miserable phoenix.

I put my hand out to unzip the sack on another body: there are all kinds, male and female, and all ages. Dai grabs the casing around the one I have and pulls it away from me.

“Do you want to fall into it?” he warns. “Touch it, and it’ll touch you.”

Inside one of the bags, a skin opens its eyes and looks at us.

I yelp and step back. The girl staring at us is brown-skinned, her hair braided. A girl my age.

Dai shudders, then slings some skins over his arm. “It’s empty. The skins just have reflexes.”

We’re taking treasure, I realize. Spoils for our defeat of the Breath ship. We’re certainly pirates now, if we weren’t before.

The skin watches me all the way out of the room as we carry her.

We load them onto
Amina Pennarum
, along with provisions, everything we can take.

Milekt and I quietly sing the remaining waspsail loose. It unspirals into the morning. It’s dawn, and below us, ocean, white waves, and a dead Breath ship, falling through the sky, dropping into the sea.

It’ll dissolve swiftly. That’s what happens, or so I’ve been told. In the water, the leftover wrecks of many Magonian ships drift, hidden, barely visible.

If you were diving, I guess you’d never know. Skyship or seaship, they’re just wrecks. And there are so many of them on the ocean floor.

“That’s the last of it,” Zal says. She’s whispering, just to me. I can hear anger in her voice, but other things too. “Caru’s gone. That’s done now. You’re forgiven for it. He was not mine in the first place, not if he betrayed me to Ley.” She’s struggling. “But that’s your last mutiny. Agreed? It ends now.”

My brain is blurred by sorrow, broken by grief.

“No more lies,” Zal continues. “We’re together, you and me, against Maganwetar.” She tucks a strand of hair behind my ear and whispers gently. “No child was ever so wanted.”

Even in the face of her display, I feel nothing. I’m gone inside.

She smiles at me. “The moment I saw you emerge is when my heart woke up. You’re loved, Aza,” she says. “Very loved.”

Loved. By Zal. It offers no comfort. But I’m back aboard
Amina Pennarum
.

Because Maganwetar hired the Breath that killed Jason.

And so, I am at war.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

Sunrise off the starboard, a white, brittle sunrise, stars still
visible above the ship’s rail, sun rising not over mountains or horizon, but over this endless ice. Inside my chest, Milekt sings his own song, and I grieve and try to reconcile myself to the thing I thought I already knew—that I’ll never see Jason again, never touch his hand again. I see him in my head for a second, not even looking at me, his intense concentration, the way he focused when he wanted something. I knew everything about him, every detail, every moment, but now I don’t.

I thought I was one who was gone.

I thought I was the one who would leave.

But now—

After a moment, I sing quietly with Milekt. We make a small whirl of white sand out of the moisture in the air above us. It hisses as it spins, and then we let it fall, sandsnow.

The icy world below us shines like an eggshell. We’re near our destination. Close to our mission.

This is what I was born for. There’s nothing else left for me.

I still don’t fit. Heart half on earth, half in the clouds. I’m still different from everyone else. There’s still no place I belong.

There are so many things so terribly wrong with the world below us—the way the rivers change colors from blue to green to brown. The way the smoke slips into the squallwhales and makes them sick, and the way Magonians starve, while earth eats.

I think about the way the capital hoards what little we harvest, leaves Magonians like Dai’s siblings to die of hunger, and murders innocents on earth—

Shh, Aza. Shh. Don’t think about it.

The only solution is to wipe the slate clean. To abandon the old ways. To change everything.

I’m on my way to save not just my own life, but the lives of all of Magonia. And now I have more reason than ever.

A squallwhale from some other pod is off to the side, industriously making snow, eyeing me, before, startled by our speed, it torpedoes forward, pinging and whistling urgently back to us, informing us that we have no business moving at this rate.

Snowmaker!
whistles the squallwhale.
Homesky! Sing and flee, sing and fly! Trouble the waters, trouble the rain! Shipstop.

Other squallwhales join the song and for a moment, we’re surrounded in every direction, an entire pod of them, calves and mothers and bulls, all of them singing furiously at us
, shipstop shipstop,
making clouds of snow and pouring them down upon the northern sea. They’re singing a blizzard.

We pay them no heed.

I take a deep breath, pushing all the pain down.

I look out from the deck of
Amina Pennarum,
down into the ice, and apparently I own this for now. This sea. This sky. Captain’s Daughter. I hear a bird calling from somewhere, a long and mournful call.

I could cry, but if I did, it would be black-blue ink tears, and frozen ones. Icicles.

I think of Caru. Maybe he has a roost now, on some ship sailing south, or is flying alone, singing his own song. He’s free, and he’s gone. I envy him.

Sleet ribbons pass my face in long tearing streaks, and silver birdfish leap in the spray, throwing out tendrils of ice and flinging them downward.

I put my hand flat against the center of my chest, trying to keep my heart safe. It hurts.

Launches detach from the edges of the ship, and rise up beside us.

I see crew members rowing into the mist as we push up through the clouds and gray to the edge of the sky, where the moon’s turning color, and night’s beginning to fall.

The deck is covered with ice, and I’m freezing, but I can’t bring myself to go below. Dai’s sitting beside me. Frozen.

I feel wrong. My heart. I miss. I miss.

I reach over and take Dai’s hand. I look at our fingers twisted together. I sing a soft note, and he echoes it, quietly, gently magnifying it. We make a tiny cloud, and he makes it rain, a miniature storm. He looks at me, and blows the cloud away, and together we watch it drift off over the deck rail. He was born to this too. There’s nothing else for him either.

Below us, I’m watching ice floes crashing against one another. I’m seeing the ocean, black between the white plains.

I hear another long call of mourning, from somewhere close.

Caru?

No. My canwr is in my lung. You get the canwr that’s assigned to you, not the one you choose. Milekt is mine. We’re bonded. It’s permanent. I think about what happens when it’s not, and I don’t want that for either of us.

Zal’s pacing the deck, her own voice humming. All the crew is lit up with it—readiness, hunger.

We’re stationing our ship above an old mine in a sandstone mountain, fitted out with everything to keep the world’s seeds safe. Its location is its security. The mountain is its protection.

This is the vault the Breath talked about.